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SOCHI, RUSSIA—Carey Price, wearing a gold medal around his neck and a smile on his face, described the feeling as “numbness.”

Canada’s national hockeyists had just repeated as Olympic champions for the first time since 1952. They’d defeated Sweden in a 3-0 dismantling that had clinical, antiseptic qualities. This was a disinfection of a game, played as though the germaphobe Canadians couldn’t stand the thought of foreign entities in their zone and took fastidious measures to eradicate their kind at the earliest possible moment. And the numbers, in an Olympic tournament in which the Canadians treated opponents the way hand sanitizer treats the flu, were remarkable to behold.

Canadian head coach Mike Babcock had his team playing an assertive, efficient style of team defence -- and it paid off with two shutouts to close out the tournament. (Martin Rose / GETTY IMAGES)

The Canadians capped the Games with back-to-back shutouts of their two most worthy rivals, the U.S. and Sweden. They’d allowed all of three goals against in six games, besting an Olympic record set by a Soviet Union team that allowed just five goals in seven games back in 1984.

That Soviet squad, of course, was essentially a bunch of full-time hockey pros playing against largely amateur competition. And that, frankly, is a bit like what Sunday’s game resembled. Canada was playing against fellow NHLers, but it wasn’t playing against equals.

If Vancouver, four years ago, had drama and near-calamity and ultimate jubilation, Sochi was uneventful, at times bordering on boring, a total and utter domination. If Canada’s historic moments of hockey glory have most often amounted to wild stabs at greatness and nick-of-time goals for the ages, this was the polar opposite.

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This was Swiss-train efficient, Soviet-Red-Army scary, accounting-firm-at-tax-time serious. The numbness Price described was the effect of operating-room hockey, Canada setting up its assembly line of surgeons and removing the vital organs of the enemy with a precision that was both serial-killer vicious and boy-next-door virtuous.

“It was a feeling of absolute trust,” was how Jonathan Toews described the feeling of being one of Canada’s automatons. “As soon as you jump over the boards you’re going out there to do the exact same thing the line before you did, and to keep that momentum going. Even when we got up two goals, we never stopped. We just kept coming at ’em, backchecking, forechecking. We didn’t give ’em any space. It was fun to watch and fun to be a part of.”

“That’s why we won,” said Steve Yzerman, the architect of a golden back-to-back. “Our best players said, ‘Guys, we’re going to win. We don’t care about individual statistics.’”

Mike Babcock, the Team Canada coach, said as much before he left a post-game press conference to partake in the closing ceremonies.

“Does anybody know who won the scoring race? Does anybody care?” he said.

The answer to those questions were, for the record: Yes, Phil Kessel. And, um, probably not.

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Babcock continued.

“Does anyone know who won the gold medal?”

The answer was — well, we all know it. He didn’t drop the mic as he left the room, but he could have.

Later on, Yzerman was asked if this was the best defensive team that Canada has ever iced.

Yzerman, who put the unit together, surveyed his memory bank — which, he acknowledged, only stretched back to 1974 — and offered his take.

“I believe so,” he said. “As far as defensively, the puck staying out of the net, quality scoring chances, shots on goal, it was a pretty dominant performance.”

That’s the modus operandi of Canada’s current generation of perfect hockey robots: They get it. They get the game plan. They get the sacrifice. They get the part about never, for a moment, worrying about who gets the credit. They get that there’s plenty to go around. They get, too, that the roster is young and there could be more glory in the offing.

Toews is all of 25 years old and he’s a winner of two gold medals and two Stanley Cups. Sidney Crosby, he of the two golds and one Cup, is 26. Par Marts, the Swedish coach, groused about needing to be more experienced to beat Canada. But the most valuable player on the Swedish roster, Henrik Lundqvist, will be 35 this time next quadrennial. The Sedin twins will be 37. Sweden’s window just closed. Canada’s is wide open.

Babcock wanted a point clarified, mind you, when the talk turned to defensive genius. It should be remembered that Canada, he essentially said, wasn’t partaking in Euro-brand defensive hockey. Canada wasn’t mimicking the bronze-winning Finns collapsing in a shell around Tuukka Rask, begging you to beat one of the world’s best goalies from beyond the human blockade.

“When we talk about great defence, sometimes we get confused,” Babcock said. “Great defence means you play defence fast and you have the puck all the time so you’re always on offence. We out-chanced these teams big-time. We didn’t score (as much as they would have liked). But we were a great offensive team. That’s how we coached it. That’s what we expected. That’s what we got. We didn’t ask guys to back up.”

That’s an important point. Canada’s collective hockey memory has been fed a diet of big-moment goals by towering figures. Paul Henderson had three straight game-winners in 1972. Wayne Gretzky set up Mario Lemieux in 1987. Sidney Crosby punctuated our 2010 glory with a golden goal.

This was different, but beautiful in its own way.

“Canada was much, much better,” said Marts, the Swedish coach.

This wasn’t victory in the clutch, this was gold medal by suffocation. This was a defence choking its foes and maybe even itself into numbness, so that a nation could scream and dance and breathe.

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